skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Myhrvold is thinking about printer "piracy" in exactly the same way that RIAA thinks about music "piracy", and we all know how productive that's been! Placing artificial legal limits on distribution technology simply doesn't work. Makers of objects that are 3D-printable need to learn from the recording industry's mistakes. Instead of trying to legislate away "piracy", they need to find ways to provide enough perceived value to consumers that they can compete. They need to learn from companies like Apple, Amazon, or Valve, not BMI, Sony, or Warners.

3D-printing is going to be rather limited at first. You're not likely to be able to 3D-print something as simple as a thermos-mug for quite some time! However, there is going to be room to use materials and construction methods that make traditionally manufactured goods distinct and desirable. There will also be ample opportunity to provide services surrounding the sale of 3D models, as Valve, Amazon, and Apple currently do for software sales.

One thing that is different from the music industry is that there will likely be a big market for bespoke designs. People are going to want items that are unique and tailored to their needs. Designing for mass production could give way to designing for individuals and industrial design could become a cottage craft. In this scenario, designers would make most of their money off of bespoke commissions. There may actually be an explosion in demand for designers since traditional manufacturing processes are not really suited to produce more than a few designs at a time. While bespoke designs may wind up being shared by buyers with "pirates", buyers will pay the cost of losing the uniqueness they paid for if they do share models. This is quite different from music. While people want their friends to listen to the music they like, they generally want to have distinctive items from them.

Similar to the labels that used to serve as distributors for music, manufacturers who only produce goods that can also be 3D-printed will be the big losers. Just as Artists who have treated "piracy" as the "new radio" have benefited, designers could also greatly benefit in a world with ubiquitous 3D printing. e.g. If a coffee mug you designed is trending on the "pirate" sites, you'll probably get a lot of bespoke commissions!

The prospects provided by 3D printing are especially enticing for consumers, and not just because it will be possible to find free designs and (presumably) save money. Consumers will have direct contact with designers and freedom from the constraints on design imposed by mass production. We are going to see the design of 3D printable models evolve to meet consumer needs faster and more effectively than at any point in human history. Whatever you're doing, the tools are just going to get more and more dialed in and perfect. You also won't need to go looking for a new design when you have an old design that was perfect, as we so often have to do now.

The only reason for DRM to exist is to protect the dinosaurs. Hopefully we've learned enough from the music and movie industries that we can be happy just letting them evolve or die.
Yep, I understand that. Still, spot pricing it relatively consistent over time, with occasional temporary spikes. A dynamic web version with this format would work too. It's less important to me that I can print it out, since I probably would just end up referring to this online as I need it.
The money won't be collected until after it has been paid out to the baby boomers and then waiting for them to die. And hoping they don't distribute it, which they will obviously do if high estate taxes come into play.

This is just nonsense. Argue for an estate tax if you want, but don't say it's to compensate for the low taxes the boomers got.
On top of this, once the coding starts, too many languages focus on command / effect (note: not cause / effect). This is arguably fine for basic looping and data structures.

The problem is I see this knowledge break when 1) it is applied to a more difficult problem that 2) is outside of the scope of the provided loop.

Spending time understanding the conceptual elements (when, where, why) before the how doesn't give immediate results, but it saves many headaches down the road and makes future tools / languages much easier to learn.
But do we agree that if SETI required moving so much data around that it was clearly difficult to keep the CPUs fully utilized then it would not be an EP problem?
Desperation is a forward going vector. I think it is only 50% of the equation. The other 50% is getting out of your own way - that is in terms of velocity. Things like never feeling sorry for yourself - that can manifest in a variety of ways. That is oft mentioned loss aversion/feeling sorry for yourself at present or in the future. If you got both parts solved you can forage forward pretty fast.

That is IMHO - at least what I gathered from years of introspection on what works and doesn't.
This is another job board. The problem is that letting the companies describe what it's like to work there isn't going to be reflective of what it's actually like to work there. Half the startups that say "flexible office hours" don't actually mean it once you're there, and many things similar to that.

Developers who work there have opinions about the company and their experience that they cannot share openly for obvious reasons.

I'd be interested in a service that exposed that kind of information.
How do your co-founders feel about you working on another project at the same time?
Thanks for writing it up. I've thought about dataflow programming before but building the dependency graph up was always annoying and the idea of sticking everything in a map and building the dep chains by introspecting the argument names hadn't occurred to me. With the ease of use solved this is handy enough that I'll probably turn it into a real promise-based utility.
Apps that have hundreds of thousands of daily users are already seeing over 80% of their users are on iOS 6

Link(s) please.
how close are the rules running here to the standard rules of Conway's Life? I know some of those are supposed to be "gliders" - is it possible to port other shapes from Life into SmoothLife?
Trying to look at how software performance has improved in the way you are looking at it doesn't really work. There is no point putting time into optimising things that run fast enough. There are many algorithms that have been improved dramatically. People use this kind of matching for DNA, nobody is busy creating slower algorithms, they are only getting faster (e.g. www-igm.univ-mlv.fr/~lecroq/articles/cpm2009fl.pdf). Prime factorisation, optimisation, etc. are all being actively researched.

In other areas people are doing things which weren't even possible on old hardware, think about 3D graphics. Real time lighting approximations are doing really clever stuff, just look at the latest unreal engine demo. If you put these into old hardware you would get the same quality render in less time. Modern ray tracing engines are using more sophisticated algorithms, giving better results in less time.

Beyond the algorithmic work optimising for modern hardware is different to old hardware. An optimal program for old hardware isn't optimal for modern hardware and vice versa. Now if a program needs data from RAM you have to wait hundreds to cpu cycles. Even accessing the L3 cache, which is in a modern processor chip, takes about 75 cycles on modern chips. So you can recalculate things and find your program runs faster.

Similar things happen with branches, I was looking at some GPU shaders recently and there was a simple raytracing loop (parallax occlusion mapping), the obvious way to do it is to stop when you intersect the surface. Instead it is actually faster to always run the loop for 10 steps because this removes the branch. So you do twice as many loop iterations on average but your code runs faster.

Of course you can afford to be sloppy as well. People are 'sloppy' so that their code is faster to write, easier to read and less likely to have bugs (3 lines of python is pretty likely to be easy to read and bug free). I would say software is advancing in many different ways, which hardware has enabled to happen.
Do the (extra) work
Two major issues

Links on posts are not auto linkable

No mobile view
Very cool! This is useful for small deployments. We developed PlanForCloud.com to help with cost forecasting for big deployments, where you want to compare infrastructure options and cloud providers.

Also, don't forget that one of the key benefit of using the cloud is elasticity, and unless you model this, you won't get accurate estimates. We developed the notion of elasticity patterns[1] to let users do this, so you can say something like "my baseline S3 storage is 100GB, but every month this grows by 5% and in the Christmas it doubles".

[1] http://www.planforcloud.com/pages/docs/patterns.html
What about iOS6 is necessary to display plain text in a magazine format? Was displaying plan text impossible to do before the miracle that is iOS6? It sure sounds like it based on these comments that a text based magazine can only be available on iOS6.
HNer kstenerud called it, in the previous thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4642484
We're all in agreement with Vu's thoughts in the "Before We Begin" section.

There's a nice benefit to it besides personal happiness; every side-project we've worked on so far has ended up getting worked back into our product in some way.
I just quit a startup because of too many MBAs walking around (as the article puts it) "blindly executing" with nobody actually working on shipping.

Kawasaki was right.
canvas + getImageData
So much CSS and JS for a single word.
this is called starting a business.
hmmm, i do need to get stuff done and i also enjoy cartoons with cereal so considering going. i'm just wondering how much will actually get done between munching, chatting and cartooning.
The structural effect of legally sanctioned DRM was to make large-scale for-profit audiovisual media replication (and services predicated in whole or part on this) impossible. It did rather less to save the old oligarchy (the entertainment-industrial cartel) though it may have slowed its decline somewhat, than it did quash the emergence of smaller-scale, decentralized upstarts.

Instead, we've ended up with Apple iTunes Store, YouTube, and a handful of streaming services such as Pandora and Spotify.

I see the Myhrvold patent as less a threat in itself than of a very strong indicator of how and what he's thinking of. And I don't care for what it suggests, though I don't know how bad the effects will be.

A huge factor for 3-D printing will be that replication isn't merely a copyright issue anymore, but that we'll be staring straight into the abyss of wide-scale patent infringement. A patent incurs infringement on anyone who ... "without authority makes, uses, offers to sell, or sells any patented invention, within the United States or imports into the United States any patented invention during the term of the patent".

Big ole' can o' worms there. And IV looks to be sitting right in the middle of it.
I don't see a detailed analysis of your RNG that would support the claim that it is suitable for use as a CSPRNG.
That's good to hear. I'm trying to convince my current boss that promoting side-projects (via hack days etc.) will be beneficial to the company but so far no luck!
Sounds like AMD may be planning to integrate an ARM on-die
http://semiaccurate.com/2011/06/22/amd-and-arm-join-forces-a...
I get it. It's just that I'm not a beginning programmer. I mean, unless the site is only for novices with zero programming skill, you're requiring all intermediate programmers to relearn stuff they've already mastered.

Also, I wanted to browse around the lessons in order to evaluate the quality of the site so that I could decide whether to recommend the site to non-programmer friends.
That hacker is claiming to be attacking Facebook and bringing it down using a CSRF attack. Sounds like crap to me, it was probably just a problem with DNS or something.
An open-source software for proposition development and decision making
When I need to unwind from coding, I code. Some play games, some watch movies, I just like building things, learning about them and sharing the knowledge. So just like anything else we do on the side to keep ourselves sane, as long as it doesn't hinder our performance, we don't mind.

We actually try to encourage each other to try new things. It keeps us sharp. We usually end up open sourcing it and integrating it into TapIn.tv anyways. I'll probably end up learning a lot about efficient time management, managing customer relationship, and machine learning I can bring back to my team through this experiment.

Who knows, maybe if this works out, we'll try to be more desperate at TapIn.
the indentation the code editor shows does not always reflect the actual indentation of the code. so i had to c+paste it into another window and then back again to get the code to run...
>Would you celebrate every time, after you fill up a tank of petrol, the price of petrol goes up?

The flaw in the analogy is that inflation isn't the price of petrol, it's the price of everything. Including wages. If in week 1 you make $1000 and spend $1000 and in week two all prices go up (including the price of your labor) so that you make $2000 and spend $2000, you don't actually care that the nominal price of commodities is increasing as long as they don't rise faster than your pay. And most investments work the same way: If you own a share of Ford and the Fed prints a trillion dollars, the nominal share price is going to go up the same as the price of anything else.

The people inflation hurts are those who have long-term agreements with fixed price terms. If you have a fixed-rate mortgage, you benefit from inflation, and the bank that owns the mortgage pays for it. If you have a ten year fixed-rate certificate of deposit, the bank benefits from inflation and the CD holder takes the beating.

But as a general rule, retirees will tend to be the ones who have CDs or fixed-rate annuities or the like, and the youth will be the ones to have student loans or owe large amounts of principal on a mortgage.
To bring some statistics in: The Talent Code cites a study that shows that people who were famous enough to appear in the Encylopedia Brittanica in 1970 were disproportionately likely to have lost a parent at a young age.[1]

So there appears to be a correlation between losing a parent at an early age and extreme success. (That doesn't mean that your expected value is higher-it's more that the variance is greater.)

[1]: http://dheart.tumblr.com/post/305580832/orphans-rule-the-wor... (excerpt) or check The Talent Code chapter 5
What makes sense is creating a spell checker library, and then having other programs used that instead of implementing spell check themselves.

Granted, if your program is such that a naive, 3-5 line python implementation is sufficient, then it is probably not worth the effort to use a library. If my web-browser, word processor, e-mail client, and every other large program that has text editing implements spell check themselves, I doubt I would get comparable performance to if they all use a library designed specifically for spell check, and optimized by many other projects that used it over history.
On the subject, I would be interested to know if most large programs I mentioned actually impalement spell check themselves.
EggDrop Shuts Down Following Craigslist C&D, But Blames Slow Growth
Stupid. Why would anyone complain about this? Windows 8 is a flexible platform which lets OEMs experiment with many different new hardware forms. It's the Cambrian explosion of the PC. Consumer selection will sort out the gems from the duds. And the next gen will be better.

Microsoft has laid a great foundation for an extremely diverse ecosystem. Apple-esque one-device-to-rule-them allism is so 2007. As someone painfully typing this out on an iPad (a platform which laughably does not support split window multi-tasking or variable thumb keyboard sizes and layouts) I can personally cannot wait to switch to a truly modern ecosystem.

No wonder Tim Cook is so eager to laugh it off.
Sorry for the sidenote, but I have to say, seeing a (YC) next to a company name that's not 2 words mashed together caught me by surprise :).

That said, if you can guys can pull this off, it looks like it should be incredibly useful.
The site appears to handle logistics only. The comparison to AliBaba implies that you can also find sellers/exporters. Can users source goods (i.e. find exporters) on HD, or is it only for managing logistics once you've found a supplier somewhere else?
What if he did have a big launch, with an app for android and a web version? What if it was a big failure and he lost more money than he made? Would that have made sense? This is a new product that he is testing the waters with. He chose the quickest and most effective way of doing this.
Hhmmm.. I live off wells, like cereal, cartoons, and finishing stuff. Sounds like fun. I have a weekend project for a dog walking site I might work on.
Actually, most of that information is unnecessary to start coding. In fact, it actually works as a barrier to entry. People who don't understand a programming language aren't going to understand the different nuances between Python and Ruby.

Instead, you teach development by having people start coding as soon as possible. You get them playing with the code, manipulating values, and seeing the outcome. Once they see that they're creating something and they enjoy doing it, that's when you explain it to them. Khan Academy has taken this approach and it has proven extremely effective in getting children to start coding.

It's really basic game theory - you don't have to explain the entire backstory or all the controls to get someone playing a game. You drop them in a situation and go "OH SHIT YOU'RE UNDER ATTACK - PRESS X TO ATTACK." You give them one instruction and get them hooked. After that, you can then go through the basic tutorials that explain the menu system and or what numbers mean or how you level up or whatever. But the point is to explain things to them as they need to know them and not before.

The point is to get people coding as quickly as possible. If someone has to read 60 pages of introductory text, they're not going to do it. It's asking for too much up front.
Your brain on pseudoscience: the rise of popular neurobollocks
Yes but search is Google (and android's) defining feature. You could make the argument that Siri is the same for iOS.
We average about 400 people per event.
If the merging isn't also word-aware, then surely this is only half a solution. I don't think the svn script you linked is able to merge (I only read the Readme, no further investigation).
I'll be downvoted for saying it, but this may be where the bloom comes off Marco's rose.

And, this comment's relevant to the HN crowd: most (if not all) successful entrepreneurs owe something to outside factors, but can develop a sort of "survivorship bias," whereby they feel like they're unduly sierra hotel.

Marco made a great app in Instapaper. Is his business and tech sector acumen as good as Instapaper?

We'll see.
The Swingers' guide to Islam
"Make complex things from simple rules" - that's pretty much defining organic in this sense.
Yeah, for us, it's kind of like 20% time except you still do it on top of all of your work and don't get paid more. 120% time?
Apple sends me an email periodically with a link to manage my Netflix and Hulu Plus subscriptions before they renew and charge me.

I haven't paid for anything on Newstand but I imagine it might work similarly.
The laws of physics don't change (probably) - a good (and correct) model of the universe will stand the test of time.

The solutions engineers devise to solve real-world problems will change as the underlying technology, science and society changes - what was a good solution at one point time may not be a good solution today - what is a good solution for one set of requirements and constraints may be an appallingly bad solution given a different set of requirements and constraints.

Oh, and this attempt to conflate the fields of engineering (devising solutions to problems) with science (devising models to explain observations) is so misguided and plain wrong I can only assume you are deliberately trolling. And given this link points back to Slashdot, I can only guess there was a bit of leakage back in the other direction...
I can confirm that Google, Facebook and some other websites are being wonky for the past two days now here in Bolivia. It's as if the DNS wiring is messed up.

Some websites load normally (fast) and Google, Facebook and others are just getting timeout errors on both Firefox and Chrome.
It looks beautiful. Hosted DBs makes much more sense when monitoring is offered at the same time.
OSH Park (formerly known as Laen's DorkbotPDX group PCB order) is very popular for prototypes in the US maker community (look for the trademark purple PCBs), and at $5/inch^2 with free US shipping it's cheaper than batchPCB for smaller boards, in addition to getting 3 copies of the board for that price. It's very high quality and it's all done at a US fab house with the 2-layer batches sent out every 2-3 days and then shipped US Mail, so if you're in the US it's pretty fast for the price.

And for pure price, Seeed and ITead (both are rumoured to use the same PCB fab) are very popular with their $10 for 10 copies of a 5cm*5cm board service. The quality is reportedly much more variable with these guys, and the shipping takes a lot longer to reach the US, but you can't beat the price. For the rest of the world, the shipping from China is probably cheaper and faster than from OSH Park, so unless you need the quality of OSH Park this is probably both cheaper and faster.
There's really no need to explain the differences in languages to a beginner. When you're teaching someone to code, you're not teaching them a language. You're teaching them (or should be teaching them) concepts that they can take to any language they need. You teach them logic, flows, etc - how to think in terms of solving a problem through programming.
Dear God,
I pray that Hacker News remains a dignified place to learn about business and computing, woking hard, and interesting things about your fascinating world.
Please help keep it focused on good things and not on puerile partisan politics.
I ask this so that I might remain focused on that which is good in your sight.
I ask this in the name of your Son.

Amen.
Took a bit longer to handle the edge cases, but we now have the max file size stopgap implemented. On your developer portal you can set the maximum size that you'll allow to be uploaded. We're still moving forward with the more fully-featured security functionality, but wanted to make this available ASAP
We will be releasing changes to the code editor which will resolve the indentation issue in Python.
Should you really always bet on JS?
... Where's the "Login" button?
Show HN: We open sourced Lockitron's crowdfunding app
Love the blue screen of death.

This is a fantastic idea, not only for Twice to acquire, but big incubators and vc funds to acquire talent for their portfolio companies.
If you want to get into JavaScript OOP, you should read
http://killdream.github.com/blog/2011/10/understanding-javas...
Has Yahoo become a better place to work with Marissa Mayer as CEO?
There is an opt-out link on instapaper's publishers page at http://www.instapaper.com/publishers

If publishers don't like being scraped by instapaper they can opt-out. So far it looks like "no major publishers" have.